Evolution
by Masked Man 2
Summary: 'Take the money... Go along; the others want it, right, and you're the only thing standing in their way. Don't they already hate you enough? Boring old David? Stick-in-the-mud David? Poker-up-the-arse David? Isn't that what they think? Is that what you want' This is a tale of the birth of a madman, told through David's eyes.
1. Lorelei

**Author's Note: Hello, Shallow Grave fans! So...I'm back, with another story, which is also gifted to my dear friend** _ **Cobainlover4ever**_ **, as she provided the prompt: '** **This has always made me ponder, the process that David goes through from the time he decides to be in on 'the plan,' and then when he's sitting at that fund raising dinner all alone at the table. He's watching Juliet dance with Alex, they are getting along very well...what would David be thinking, realizing? Would that be solidified when he finds them together after their spending spree?'** **I took the liberty of expanding the story idea from three chapters to five as I felt that there were a couple of other key 'moments' that contributed to our Mr. Stevens's 'journey' from tenuous sanity to abject madness and unwilling moral depravity, but...Bree, this is for you!**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own** _ **Shallow Grave**_ **, though it'd be fun if I did. I also don't own** _ **Gone in 60 Seconds**_ **, but if anyone can find the line that I shamelessly stole from it, I'll give you the number to the flat, tell Alex that he should expect a call from his favorite sex line, and let you two get it going. ;)**

"Good morning, Lumsden and Sons Accounting. How may I help you?"

Leigh Oliver's soft, mewling voice, just barely audible beyond the span of his neat desk, was little more than a feather-brush of sound that carefully stroked the gaping wound that the ringing of his telephone had torn in the library's oppressive silence- a silence so heavy as to be nearly tangible. A funereal thing, it was: lifeless, listless, dully torpid, yet living and breathing still, adamant in its desire to let no noise louder than a whisper permeate the fragile glass of its tender flesh.

Normally David didn't mind the silence- really, its ghostly presence was actually quite soothing when compared to the exuberantly obnoxious inanity of Alex's morning prattle- but today, something about it seemed to set every nerve in his body on edge. There was a strange tension in the air, a sort of charged prickling not unlike the fretful dance of electrified atmospheric particles that preceded a storm, that pervaded the stale air of the library so strongly that he could practically smell it. Certainly he could _see_ it: a swarm of tiny, shivering snake-squiggles of an icy grey-blue darting about his field of vision, hissing and crackling in a language known only to the visions conjured up by his subconscious. A warning, he couldn't help but think, or perhaps a reminder...but of what? From those warped syllables he could derive no meaning, and wasn't that just bloody _typical._ Too dense to ever understand what even his own mind was telling him half the time, wasn't that what Dad had always said?

X X X

Frustrated, he heaved out a noiseless breath that sank through his body as though it bore the weight of all his irritation and disgusted bemusement, and lifted his eyes to the curly-headed figure of Leigh, still mumbling away into the phone. Even the numbers in his file had ceased to make sense to him by then, swimming and blurring dizzyingly before eyes that burned with strain and boredom...and for the numbers, with their typically ubiquitous power to reassure and restore, to fail him so completely, so unprecedentedly...that terrified him, more than anything he'd ever known before ever had. The numbers were (had always been) the one thing upon which he could depend for security, because in this mad world in which nothing lived longer than a second past its moment of usefulness, they were always there- never changing, always creating the same patterns and outputs. Cold. Logical. Sensible. Why, then, did that same comfortable constancy now abhor him so much that he could barely bear to even look upon its figures?

 _...Because it's so bleeding BORING, innit?_ The thought came to him suddenly, Alex's smooth voice ringing out clear as day against the muffled-cotton disjunction of his own befuddled musings. It wasn't a conclusion he would ever have reached on his own, but...the more he pondered it, the more he began to see a kernel of truth within it. The numbers and ledgers and calculations might've been calm and safe, but there was no pleasure to be taken from something that remained, day in, day out, precisely the same. Even Lumsden himself had pointed that out, hadn't he? _Yes, maybe sometimes we're a wee bit boring_...what had he meant? Had he meant _him,_ David? Or had he meant the lot of them- the merry band of chartered drudgery, naught but shuffling moles locked forever into tunnels of wearying banality?

X X X

Neither idea was particularly appealing. As he cast his gaze about the room once more, taking in the seated rows of the suited, the vested, and the bespectacled, the endless shelves of musty old books and the endless bent heads of musty old men, and the deafening silence in the library, he felt the familiar claustrophobia rise up within him, a fear that he hadn't felt since he and the others had first burst in on Hugo's naked corpse- an overwhelming, choking feeling of walls closing in, of breath stilling and heart racing and _Christ-please-I'm-trapped-let-me-out-let-me-the-fuck-out_ ….

 _No more!_ he wanted to scream, and squeezed his faltering eyes shut, and when he opened them again Juliet was there, sitting calmly in front of his desk like she'd been there for hours, oblivious to his private struggle. He hadn't heard her come in, hadn't even been alerted of her approach, but she was _there,_ her blue eyes shining cat-like in a sedate pale face adorned with the subtle little smirk he knew all too well. _Come with me_ , it seemed to whisper, and suddenly those eyes were mirrors, reflecting back to him all of the thoughts, all of the desires, that he'd travailed to keep hidden from even himself for fear of confronting the shame of them.

 _Take the money. Hugo's dead; he can't care about it anymore, and no one even knows where it's got to! Go along; the others want it, right, and you're the only thing standing in their way. Don't they already hate you enough? Boring old David? Stick-in-the-mud David? Poker-up-the-arse David? Isn't that what they think? Is that what you want?_

David blinked, twitched. Juliet just stared, silently, invitingly, the mirrors of her eyes a beckoning Lorelei to his uneasy conscience. Maybe she wasn't really there. Maybe his fevered mind, in abject desperation for some sort of justification, or approval, had put her there. Maybe she wasn't there...but she was enough.

" _Let's do it_."

 **Well, I'm not particularly satisfied with this latest set of ramblings (then again, when am I ever satisfied?), but...here it is.**

 **I didn't create the character of 'Leigh Oliver;' he's that curly-headed fellow whose phone was ringing in this scene in the accounting library. He wasn't given a name in the script (or in the film credits), so I took the liberty of inventing one. That being said, I actually have no idea what he said when answering the phone. No matter how high I turned the volume, I could only ever make out 'good morning,' 'Lumsden,' and 'how can I help you,' so...I may have misquoted him. Sue me.**

 **I'd love to know your thoughts, be they good or bad! Stay tuned for Chapter 2!**


	2. The Game

**AN: Hello, dear readers! So, here's yet another chapter that I think sucks...but never mind that. I wanted to thank my dear friend** _ **Cobainlover4ever**_ **for her support of this story; I've loved our conversations about this film!**

 **With that in mind, I wanted to clear up what may or may not have been a point of confusion. These chapters all take place during specific scenes of the film. The first chapter, for example, took place in that scene in the accounting library; this one takes place just before and during the 'drawing of the straws' in the woods.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own** _ **Shallow Grave**_ **. If I did, Alex and David may or may not have been a couple. Just saying. XD**

It was November eighteenth, nineteen-ninety-three, when they finally deigned to bring Hugo to his grave. Half nine in the evening when their lives changed forever, and as they stood in grim silence among icy mist and fractured light, a council of demon gods playing with Fate and Destiny like cat's-cradle strings, Juliet knew, Alex knew, David knew, without ever speaking the words- _nothing will ever be the same again_.

X X X

The creaking branches closed in around Alex as he walked deeper into the grove, as though trying to erase every last trace of his existence. Shivering, David pulled his jacket more tightly about himself, feeling a sudden and inexplicable chill pass through his bones that had nothing to do with the bitterness of the dreich night air. Beside him, Juliet stood motionless, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes clenched firmly shut, her sharp face pinched in a pensive, even nervous sort of way...but that was ridiculous, wasn't it? Juliet didn't get _nervous_. Juliet was the blithe one, the calm one, the confident one: ever the Good Doctor, unflappable and coy and cold even as she saved the lives of those under her knife. _Her_ soft, milk-pale hands were the ones to cut into dead and dying flesh every day; _her_ wily mind was the one to call this whole sordid affair _unfeasible_ , questions of morality be damned. How could _she_ , of all people, be getting cold feet now? It was unfathomable. It was... _unfeasible._

Then again...he supposed that even the strongest of them was entitled to feeling at least a bit of anxiety now, of all times. Before, all of _this_ had seemed like nothing more than a game, some formless idea content to remain untouched in the far corners of some distant and unimagined future, but _now_...now, there was a plastic-wrapped corpse in a stolen van, a satchel of innocuous tools of butchery hand-picked for slaughter, and the horrid, creeping realization like ice in his veins that Death stood shrouded somewhere beside them, waiting patiently to reap whichever sorry soul drew the short straw and dashed its wretched self onto the jagged rocks of total moral depravity.

Perhaps Juliet felt the premonition, too, as she turned slightly inward to face him, bracing one trembling hand against the van's hood as if she thought she could draw strength from the low thrum of warm steel beneath her palm. David, too, edged backwards, moving further into the pitifully small circle of light emanating from the idling van's headlights. Slowly he let his eyes drift to rest upon the thick shadows trying to encroach themselves upon the circle's mist-blurred edges. Through the waves of icy terror that were taking it upon themselves to consume him with ever-growing intensity, he observed with almost clinical detachment how the faint outlines of branches and aging leaves shifted, twisted, painting in the dark autumn sky the figure of a hood, a cloak, a scythe. The flickers of lightning-bugs became eyes, red and warm and hard, meeting his own blue ones with almost an almost malevolent impassivity.

 _Judgement Day_ , they whispered, their voices a desiccated rasp ignorant of all time and light, and he shivered again, hating that Juliet was standing _right there beside him_ deaf to the sound and blind to the sight, hating that even in this moment of such impossible significance he was left to face the demons alone, _always alone_ …. _Nothing but a game, is Judgement Day, David Stevens: the game of life, your eternally short gamble, but I always win in the end, don't I? Will you challenge me, put me off another eye-blink day?_ _ **Why**_ _challenge me? Shall we end it now, end the pain and fear and cold? It's just a game, after all. Are you going to play, or not?_

X X X

The sudden rustling of bushes pulled both David and Juliet from their respective reveries, and twin pairs of pale blue eyes snapped up into focus as one as Alex came traipsing through the undergrowth towards the dim circle of light. In one hand he clutched three thin twigs, cupping their ends protectively with his palm and leaving the knoblike heads, all level with each other, open and ready to be plucked, little harbingers of doom trapped in the light and airy prison of dead and unfeeling wood.

"All right, then, here we are an' this is it," Alex mused aloud, a ringing shout in the silence of the wood. The brash bravado that so often suffused that smooth voice quavered, cracked, and for a moment his young face held all of the earnest confusion and fear of a lost and lonely child set adrift in a world beyond his capacity for understanding. Just as soon as it made itself known, though, the terror was gone, the bold mask back in place, and when he looked up his clear eyes glittered like diamonds, hard and cold and oh-so-eager to play just one more role, to act the puppeteer on their macabre stage of destiny. "D'you wanna play, or not?"

X X X

Wary gazes flicked about the circle of three, meeting and breaking again in a heartbeat's time, all guarded, all cool, all yearning to read and unwilling to be read. Alex swallowed thickly, glanced down. David blinked, glanced out. Juliet sighed, a tiny, noiseless thing, and reached out, her delicate fingers grasping the twig that sat at the topmost point of the triangle, closest to her. Slowly, achingly slowly, she drew it up and out, letting it scrape against its fellows with a grating, whining rasp. All watched with bated breath as its length became visible: one inch, two inches, three inches, four. Any longer and its tapered, rounded end would've been poking out of the curve of Alex's curled palm, and Juliet heaved another sigh of ineffable relief. _Safe._

Eyes wide, full lips parted in breathless, anxious anticipation, Alex turned to David, a tremor running through his arm making the motion of holding out the two remaining twigs forceful and aggressive...a challenge. The eyes lit up, gleaming _come on, then_ and _what are you waiting for_? Scornful cries of _I'm not going to do it just because you won't_ pricked at David's mind like thorns tearing holes into the tattered vestiges of his pride, and he brought his hand up to meet Alex's in defiance of them. _Challenge accepted._ He wasn't some coward; he wasn't the quivering pansy that Alex so often accused him of being. Bloody _hell_ , it wasn't _his_ fault that he _couldn't bloody do it_ , that his conscience screamed itself hoarse crying out _wrong-wrong-wrong_ whenever he looked into Hugo's unseeing eyes and remembered what they were about to do to him; it wasn't his fault that he actually _had_ a conscience! Not like Juliet, with her cool cat's eyes and the blood of a thousand innocents on her healer's hands. Not like Alex, with his childish excitement, thinking that this was just some silly game.

 _I can't do it. I can't do it._ His fingers hovered over the thinner of the two heads and faltered, doubt seizing him suddenly and paralyzing the limbs that only a moment before had acted with such ephemeral courage. Death's scarlet gaze burned hot into his, His featureless face twisting into some terrible facsimile of laughter, delighting in His ubiquitous foreknowledge, pitying the poor little fools who fancied themselves champions of Fate. His scythe was a pinprick pain in the back of his neck, choosing him, marking him. _Just a game...just a stupid,_ _ **stupid**_ _game_...but what if he lost? Two twigs left, fifty-fifty odds...but if he lost? The scythe would sink into him, sever his soul...God, he'd be gone, gone and unable to return and condemned to burn in Hell forever because this, all this, was _wrong_ , it was sick and twisted and _**wrong**_ **,** and it _wasn't fucking worth it, any of it-!_ Not the money, not the others' approval, _nothing! I can't do it!_ _ **I can't do it!**_

X X X

Alex's eyes flickered suddenly, just a slight shift to the right and back again, but David caught it and froze. He had looked at the thicker twig...had it been a clue? Or just...restlessness, nervousness, boredom? Then again, if it had meant nothing...then why was Alex looking at him like that? A scrap of pity in his diamond blue eyes, a warm flash of reassurance. _Trust me_ , they said, inviting and friendly and nothing like how Alex would look at him in real life. _Trust this_.

His fingers moved of their own accord, desperate to latch onto even that fledgling hope, the single spindly olive branch that could bring him back from the throes of oblivion, and grasped at the thicker twig. One inch. Two inches. The end so close to the top, jagged and broken and sharp like it had been snapped off. Severed. _Shortened_.

 _No, no...please, please God, please, no…_ and then Alex opened his palm. One inch. Two inches...three inches. Half an inch.

The scythe edged in deeper, and Alex let his eyes drift shut, his entire being relaxing as his mind's lips whispered _safe. Safe. Safe._

X X X

David stared at the little scrap of twig in his palm, uncomprehending. It...it _couldn't_ be. He had been _so close_ , a mere hair's breadth away from salvation-! and he had let it go. _Lead us not into temptation_ , and all that bollocks, but he _had_ been lead, by _trust_ , by the wish to trust a _friend_...and he'd been had. He had lost. His conscience cried _wrong, wrong, wrong_ , but his mind sighed _undone, undone, undone_ , and his conscience collapsed under the weight of the scythe that reached into him with icy hands and dragged out his faltering soul, sapping the life from it and rendering it feeble, exhausted...dead.

"I can't do it!" he cried aloud, but even his own ears were deaf to the plea, and as he cast desperate eyes out to Alex and Juliet, beseeching mercy that he knew would never come...he looked into their eyes and saw a meager flash of pity give way to Death: Death dancing, laughing, spinning manically upon the ashes of his soul and reveling in its damnation. _I win_ , it and she and he all said, gleeful taunts of children having bested their weaker brethren at their favorite games. _I win_. _You lose_.

Then they stepped back as one, and he was alone again, always alone, in a world too cold for such distance. The echoes of his quashed conscience whispered _wrong, wrong, wrong_ , but the echoes were only shadows now, fading to dust and leaving only joyous Death behind. _I win. You lose._

 **Whatever game they've been playing, I want no part in it. End of story. :(**


	3. All or Nothing

**AN: ...Yeah, it's been a couple of months, alright? I'm rusty. I've barely written a word all summer. Cut me the slightest bit of slack.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own** _ **Shallow Grave**_ **. I just own a copy.**

 _Gran's house always smelled of cigarette smoke and peaches- even now, in the height of summer, when every window and door remained open, cheerful and wide, until the sun began to list westward for its nightly slumber. Everything was closed now, battened down tight against the thunderstorm that raged inside and trapping that sweet, cloying poison inside, where it surrounded Gran like morning's hazy mist. He choked on it, longed to be free of it, but she sat in her old blue armchair like a queen holding court, comfortable as you please, smoking B & H Silvers and eating peach jam on rye toast, her beady little eyes of palest blue watching him unseeing as her mind drifted anywhere and anywhen but here._

 _He might've been calling her a witch for days behind her back, but he couldn't blame her for spacing out, really, when_ here _was such an unpleasant place to be at the moment. He himself sat huddled beneath the west-facing window in the corner, the cracked wooden beads of Grandad's old abacus moving restlessly beneath fingers that jumped with every clap of thunder, shook with every wail of storm wind, twitched with every tinny_ click-click-click _of Gran's knitting needles. Still, she could've been arsed to look elsewhere; he hated the feel of her eyes on him- they made him feel stupid and clumsy and small- but the feeling of being forgotten in the dark with only the beads and the storm for company was infinitely worse, so he said nothing, as always, and wished in the privacy of his head that Mum and Dad would hurry back from their anniversary trip to Aberdeen and save him from this place, this place of quiet poison and dusty age and laughing, icy eyes._

 _"'Tis bairns like ye thay like th' best, ye ken," Gran said suddenly, her creaking voice making him flinch as it shattered the rain-soaked quiet of the living room._

 _"Who's_ thay _?" he asked, glancing up at Gran and down to the abacus and back again, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, unsure if he really wanted to know._

 _Gran took a deep drag on her cig, letting the silver smoke hiss and curl out slowly from the space between her puckered prune lips. "Th' birds, David lad," she muttered, her seamed little eyes meeting his, gleaming with a spark of glee that made him shiver. "Th' Sluagh, like. Thay come in frae th' Wast, thare ewest whaur ye're sittin' nou. Hale nestie lot o' thaim black birds._

 _"Och, aye, thay'll claut up th' deid," she continued absently, completely oblivious to his growing horror, her needles clicking absently, a ceaseless white noise that wove a spell of doom in the dreich night air. Her eyes were far away, farther even than before, blank and blind and cold as stone as she watched for spirits that were beyond his sight. "Thay'll tak th' deid an' deein, an' mak 'em thair ain, but 'tis th' leevin thay luve th' maist. Douce 'an sakeless wee sowels like yers, 'at's whit thay luve. Wratchit, wickit birds."_

 _Then she closed her icy eyes and laughed, a rusty laugh like footsteps running over old floorboards, the sound a pale blue like her witch's eyes, streaming from her mouth like the Nuckelavee's cursed breath, stinking of peaches of smoke, and he was struck by the thought that_ this _was what madness must smell like. The cancer that had ravaged her lungs had eaten away her brain, making her see spirits and birds and ghosts before her when there was only frightened_ him _. God, this was madness, this was poison...but what a sweet,_ sweet _poison it must have been, for Gran to love it too much to do without…._

X X X

He could see them now. A restless, ageless swarm of writhing black circled the stark white plaster of his ceiling, screeching and reaching out to him with withered, rotting hands, but even as he wondered, vaguely, how they had gotten in through the closed window, he couldn't muster up anything more than a slight sense of unease at the sight of them. In desiccated voices that knew nothing of time or light, they whispered, over and over again, _tiugainn_ and _thig cuide rinn_ and _mo_ , _tàth, feum_ , but he wasn't afraid of them, not when he could have said with such certainty why they were here and who they'd come for. No one in this flat was innocent, but he was the only one dead, and they only took the depraved on their deathbeds...so. Realistically speaking, they were there for him. All for the best, really. It wasn't as though he deserved any kinder fate.

X X X

Such a strange thing it was, to be dead with a mind still active. His body lay stiff and torpid on the hard bed, but his hands twitched restlessly by his sides, clenched tight as if they still held the twig, the hacksaw, the hammer, that had sealed Hugo's fate and his own and had condemned him to the undying hell that loomed fever-bright above him. _Back and forth, up and down_...on and on they went, twisting cool, crisp linen but hearing the dull sucking sound of warm metal carving cold, unyielding flesh, feeling the harsh bent-wicker snap of dry bone cleft in formless halves….

He couldn't get the memory out of his head. Like a horror film on endless loop, it played itself out in his mind, making his throat burn with fresh bile and his glassed eyes sting with tears that refused to do him the kindness of falling...but then, he didn't precisely deserve to shed them, now, did he? No, the _Sluagh_ and their ilk, malevolent soul-eaters of the worst sort, were all he bloody _deserved_ now, _right_ -?

Christ, he hadn't _wanted_ to do it- did that count for nothing?! It should've been Juliet, it should've been fucking _Alex_ getting punished for thinking up this bloody circus scheme in the first place, never mind forcing him to take part, with their- their- sodding _smiles_ and _visions_ and bloody _nods of encouragement,_ fucking _tricking_ him into thinking that _maybe_ they were taking pity on a fellow human soul, a bloody suffering soul, for _once_ in their fucking _miserable_ lives-!

 _Well?!_ he wanted to scream, _was it worth it?! One million fucking pounds, was it_ **fucking** _worth it?! Worth Hugo's life, worth mine? Was it?_ _ **WAS IT?!**_ And he did scream, until his voice was as raw as his heart and mind, worn to nothing with the madness of regret, but it had never been there- _they_ had taken it, clawed it from him as he had torn Hugo's soul from his mutilated corpse- and his cries went unheard, dissolved into the shameful echoes of guilty silence broken only by the screaming of all Time's unforgiven souls.

X X X

 _Three soft knocks: dull raps heavy on painted wood. A click: the feeble protestations of a lock left carelessly open. A creak: the telltale groan of unoiled hinges giving way._ The door opened, and the wailing _Sluagh_ vanished in the blink of an eye, spirited away into thin air by the presence of vibrant life. The plaster of the ceiling held no trace of their presence, and the room was plunged into such a complete quiet that he couldn't help but wonder if they'd simply never been, if he'd imagined them. If this was not death, but madness, that plagued him, for surely only a madman would find the sudden silence so deafening.

"Are you alright?" Ah, so it was Juliet who'd come to him. Juliet, who'd sat prettily on her little tree stump, lit cigarette dangling from idle fingertips while Alex had attacked the forest floor and he'd attacked Hugo's corpse. Juliet, who'd done nothing to help and everything to harm. Juliet, serpent to his Eve, who'd seduced him, tempted him, reassured him...killed him. Aye, _aye_ , she had done, hadn't she? Killed him? She'd gone and done that, and now she had the audacity, the bloody _nerve_ , to ask if he was _alright_?! Bloody _temptress_ , bloody _minx,_ bloody _bastard_ devil, she-!

 _Fantastic, lass, absolutely_ fucking _fantastic; death is just so bloody_ relaxing, _innit?_ The words lay like blades at the tip of his tongue, yearning to spring free, to see if they would cut, would bleed, but what came out instead was, "Oh, yes, I'm fine, thanks. Just fine." Even to his own ears, the words sounded hollow. Dreamlike. As though someone else, not _David_ but some strange creature of abstracted reason, were speaking. Sham words for a sham life. How fitting.

"...Would you like to talk about it?" Bless the bitch, but she actually sounded _uncertain_. So very unlike her, that...but if this shadow of a life, this man of straw, didn't speak like David, then neither did he think like him, for he revelled in the obvious puissance of Juliet's discomfort. If David deserved death, then surely _she_ deserved that much, a thousand times over!

"No," he said, and _God_ , did he love the sound of it. Firm. Clipped. Uncompromising. Untainted by doubt. Brooking no argument. Granted, what little humanity remained in him railed at the stout declaration, begging to unleash its burdens and torments upon anyone willing to provide a remotely sympathetic ear, but that desire, to _speak_ , to _confess_ , was tamped down, viciously, leaving only cold resolve in its wake. Juliet had never listened to him before, not really; certainly Alex hadn't even tried. Why should that change now?

Perhaps Juliet, possessed of some inner sixth sense that enabled her to sniff out all of the finer nuances of human nature for exploitation, could sense the direction that his thoughts had traveled in, for she turned and left him without another word, casting but a single unreadable glance back before retreating like a dog with its tail between its legs, shutting and locking the door gently behind her. Just as well. A monster had no need for confession, and it wouldn't do to grow tempted. Best to just keep silent, as he always did and always would. _All or nothing_ , Alex had shouted at him, and he'd stayed silent then: had kept his head down and done his job, barely conscious of their gazes, intent upon him as he worked and they sat idle. _All or nothing,_ indeed. Well, he had given them his all. He'd given it to them without ever contemplating refusal, resistance, and look where it had gotten him. This place? This place of madness, of death and blurred lines and unfeeling silence? This... _this_ was _nothing._

 **Well, there's** _ **that**_ **travesty. ...Christ, I haven't used that much Scots dialect in a story since I wrote** _ **A Winter's Tale**_ **last year. That being said, here are some translations:**

' **Tis bairns like ye thay like th' best, ye ken: It's kids like you they like the best, you know**

 **Thay come in frae th' Wast: They come in from the West**

 **Thare ewest whaur ye're sittin' nou: There near where you're sitting now**

 **Hale nestie lot o' thaim black birds: Whole nasty lot of them black birds**

 **Och, aye, thay'll claut up th' deid: Oh, yes, they'll snatch up the dead**

 **Thay'll tak th' deid an' deein: They'll take the dead and dying**

 **Mak 'em thair ain: Make them their own**

' **Tis th' leevin thay luve th' maist: It's the living they love the most**

 **Douce 'an sakeless wee sowels like yers: Sweet and innocent little souls like yours**

' **At's whit thay luve: That's what they love**

 **Wratchit, wickit birds: Wretched, wicked birds**

 **I also attempted to insert some actual Scottish Gaelic in here, which is...probably very wrong, so if anyone wants to correct me, please don't hesitate to do so.**

 **Tiugainn: Come along**

 **Thig cuide rinn: Come along with us**

 **Mo: Mine**

 **Tàth: Join**

 **Feum: Need**

 **I did a lot of research for this chapter (far more than I should have, in retrospect) regarding the Scottish mythology. The legend of the Sluagh was a fascinating one: these deathless-yet-dead souls, unforgiven and remorseless, cursed through their own sheer evil to wander the moors forever in that restless, tormented swarm, feeding on the world's depraved and dying souls...and on its innocent children, which I found even more terrifying. The Nuckelavee was another interesting case: the most terrible and feared of all Scottish demons, a half-man, half-horse things that could wilt crops, sicken livestock, and bring plague, famine, and drought with little more than its breath. In keeping with the slightly supernatural air of the previous chapter, I couldn't resist dropping these tidbits in.**

 **I'd love some reviews!**


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